SAINTE-MARIE-LA-MER (ANP/AFP) - In het zuiden van Frankrijk zijn bijna 3000 mensen geëvacueerd om natuurbranden. De brandweer probeert met blushelikopters en blusvliegtuigen het vuur bij de plaatsen Sainte-Marie-la-Mer en Canet-en-Roussillon onder controle te krijgen.

Ongeveer de helft van de evacuees verbleef op campings in de omgeving. Twee brandweerlieden raakten lichtgewond bij de bluswerkzaamheden. Volgens minister van Infrastructuur Laurent Nunen zijn sinds woensdag 1200 brandweerlieden bezig het vuur te bestrijden.

Frankrijk kreeg in juni te maken met recordhitte. Tijdens een elf dagen durende hittegolf klom de temperatuur tot boven de 40 graden in veel plaatsen, waardoor de kans op natuurbranden toeneemt.

Verschillende politici vinden dat de regering te weinig heeft gedaan om de Fransen te beschermen tegen de hittegolf. Parlementsleden van de Groenen hebben daarom een motie van wantrouwen ingediend.

BARCELONA (ANP) - De deelnemers aan de Tour de France zijn voor de Sagrada Família in Barcelona gepresenteerd aan duizenden wielerfans. Tijdens de anderhalf uur durende presentatie kwamen alle renners langs, met de ploeg UAE Team Emirates van viervoudig winnaar en titelverdediger Tadej Pogačar als laatste.

De Nederlandse ploeg Visma-Lease a Bike, met tweevoudig winnaar Jonas Vingegaard, kwam als voorlaatste het podium voor de Sagrada Família op. De wereldberoemde basiliek vormde het centrum van de ploegenpresentatie. De renners kwamen aanrijden over de Avinguda de Gaudí vanaf het fraaie voormalige ziekenhuis Sant Pau.

Onder anderen de Spaanse zangeressen Sílvia Pérez Cruz en Lia Kali traden op.

Welcome to the LGBTQIA+ News Post for July 1, 2026. I know I've been gone for a while from posting, but life has been very difficult. No clouds in my stones, let it rain, I hydroplane in the bank..

The Bad News The United States Supreme Court, in the cases of Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., has ruled that state laws creating bans on transgender students playing in sports leagues that match their gender presentation are upheld. One of the implications is that Title IX equality requirements should be based on apparent gender as determined at birth and not by gender presentation. The judgement went 6-3, with the decision being written by Brent Kavanaugh, with additional concurring opinions written by Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. The three dissenting justices had their dissent written by Justice Sotomayor. The entire opinion can be read at this link. Kavanaugh finished his opinion with this bit of 'please don't kill me' drivel:

"We emphasize one last point. Most of the biological female and transgender student-athletes who are involved in transgender sports disputes around the country are teenagers or in their early twenties. Those student-athletes want to play sports. Their desire to compete warrants respect. No student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified.

Thomas's concurrence actually approves of conversion therapy, using in it the sentence:

"Because "gender dysphoria" is a mutable mental state that is the object of psychiatric treatment [emphasis mine], it does not resemble the immutable characteristics on the basis of which our precedents have applied heightened scrutiny— race, sex, or national origin."

Gorsuch's concurrence specifically states, flat out, that Bostock support the decision:

Second, Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U. S. 644 (2020), supports, not undermines, the Court's conclusion. There, Cite as: 609 U. S. ____ (2026) GORSUCH, J., concurring 3 we faced the question whether firing an employee for being homosexual or transgender amounted to "discriminat[ion] . . . because of . . . sex" in violation of Title VII. Id., at 650– 651, 655 (internal quotation marks omitted). In answering that question, we took two things as given. One, everyone agreed that firing an employee counts as "discrimination" in violation of Title VII if done because of sex. See id., at 681. Two, we read the word "sex" in Title VII to refer to biological sex. Id., at 655. Given all that, the only issue we had to resolve was whether discriminating against individuals for being homosexual or transgender qualifies as discrimination "because of " their biological sex. We held that it does. The statutory phrase "because of " does not require biological sex to be the only cause animating discrimination. Instead, that phrase merely requires biological sex to be one such cause. Id., at 656–659. And, as we detailed in our opinion, discriminating against a person for being homosexual or transgender necessarily entails discriminating against that person at least in part because of his biological sex. Id., at 660.*

Justice Sotomayor's dissent includes this little bit of brilliant commentary:

In either event, because unresolved factual questions prevent the Court from assessing the merits of B. P. J.'s equal protection claim at this time, the Court should allow the District Court to address those factual questions in the first instance. Yet in an opinion unencumbered by fact or law, the majority today cuts off that process prematurely, deciding instead that B. P. J.'s case must end now.

The killer of transgender University of Washington student Juniper Blessing has been found incompetent to stand trial and has been ordered to undergo competency restoration treatments in order for him to stand trial. The state of Florida has two of his congressional reps, Randy Fine and Greg Steube (both of who are rabidly homophobic and transphobic) writing letters to two bodies that oversee Irish dance organizations in the US, claiming (I shit you not) that having a trans girl competing should not be allowed because she has a biological edge. They cite no science. The Attorney General of Florida, James Uthmeier has threatened legal action against the competition in Orlando they are complaining about, along with the aforementioned letters. The bar is buried in the crust of the Earth, and these three fucksticks are renting drilling equipment for digging. Professional jackass and multiply-indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has walked back his previous support and now calls for restrictions on IVF fertility treatments. I mean, as long as those 'restrictions' are on the doctors not being shitty people, I could almost agree with him, a phrase that makes me nauseous. (This is also happening as he is seen jetting off to Iceland with his alleged mistress after campaigning on "Christian Values".) In Kansas, a transgender woman, Kris Ripper, was charged with operating a motor vehicle without a valid license. The reason: after updating her license after last year's Kansas law requiring sex on birth certificate on your driver's license, she updated it. When she was stopped for driving in the rain without headlights (they turned off automatically and she was unaware), she was pulled over, and the officer in question questioned if her license was real because he believed that she did not appear to be male, as the license stated. No citation was issued at the time of the stop; she received a failure to appear notice afterwards. The charges have, thankfully, been dropped. Sad News Transgender Filipino-American Kataluna Enriquez, the first openly transgender woman to participate in the Miss USA Pageant, was in an automobile accident and hospitalized for two weeks. Best wishes for her recovery. It was determined that actress Daveigh Chase, best known for her voice acting as Lilo in Lilo and Stitch and Chihiro in the dubbed version of Spirited Away, as well as performance in the US remake of The Ring as the murderous ghost Samara, had died of complications from AIDS, including sepsis and bacterial meningitis. She also had been homeless before her death, and was a drug user. Drag queen Jade Sotomayor (no known relation to the Supreme Court Justice), who participated in the first season of RuPaul's Drag Race, has reportedly been involved in a severe car accident and remains in critical condition. The Good News A federal judge in California has ruled that the Justice Department likely cannot lawfully obtain confidential medical records identifying transgender minors who received gender-affirming care at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford. The entire decision can be read at this link. Another federal judge, this one in DC, has certified a class of transgender service members and prospective service members for the purposes of a suit against the Orange Shit's ban on trans people serving in the military. The State of New Jersey previously had executive orders in place to protect its trans residents, which the new governor, Mikie Sherrill, affirmed she would continue. But executive orders can be revoked by a governor. Well, as of today, through the passing of two bills, the State of New Jersey has just passed a transgender shield law. Gov. Pritzker of Illinois signed three Trans Rights bills into law, and then went to march in a Pride parade. The deeply divisive, controversial Senatorial candidate from Maine, Graham Platner, has come forward to pledge to protect trans kids at the Portland Pride March. He stated "If people want to come after me and say, 'It's a bad thing that you think people should be free and equal and treated with dignity,' let them make that argument. That's the argument of a fascist. That's the argument of a bigot. And if fascists and bigots hate me, then I welcome that." (While he admits that he's had a really problematic history talking about the LGBTQIA+ community, he also has said, "Today I find that stuff abhorrent, and I am sorry that I ever used it.") For a while, it seemed that Mayor Zohran Mamdani of NYC was going to help trans adults in the city, but avoiding ticking off the idiots in DC. Well, that's changed, as he's going to give $15 million for trans youth care. The Daughters of the American Revolution have gotten a bit more revolutionary by voting to not exclude transgender women from membership. The announcement includes the phrase, "Transgender Americans are patriots, family members, volunteers, historians, and descendants of Revolutionary War ancestors just like anyone else." The child of neo-Nazi Derek Black, close friend of David Duke, has released a book entitled The Klansman's Son, and in that book has come out as transgender. The article deadnames her; she is using the name Adrienne now. In Hungary, tens of thousands of people turned out for the first Pride celebration in Budapest in years after the electoral loss of Viktor Orbán. While there was a march last year for Pride, it was a protest march, not a celebratory one. Boldog Pride-ot! The Cinnamon Roll Report Zendaya has stated that the thing that got her falling in love with Tom Holland was his appearance of Lip Synch Battle performing "Umbrella". Apparently, it was his confidence that sent her swooning. (You can see her falling in the video. It's brilliant.) Be well, friends. If you have news I missed or you want to share your personal triumphs, bring them here! Let us know your joys, so that we can offset the sadness and horror. When the sun shine, we shine together Told you I'll be here forever Said "I'll always be your friend" Took an oath, I'ma stick it out 'til the end Now that it's rainin' more than ever Know that we'll still have each other You can stand under my umbrella You can stand under my umbrella

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: WhatsApp this week started rolling out username reservations ahead of the broader launch planned later this year. The feature -- which lets people find and message each other by handle instead of phone number -- is already raising impersonation concerns, drawing scrutiny from security experts and regulators in India, the app's largest market, with more than 500 million users. The rollout marks a shift in how people identify one another on WhatsApp. Instead of relying on phone numbers as the primary identifier, users will increasingly interact through platform-managed usernames, a change that Meta says improves privacy but that critics argue could create new opportunities for impersonation.

[...] Asked about how it protects against impersonation, Meta told TechCrunch it reserves usernames for public figures, government entities, and "some variations" of those names so only the legitimate owner can claim them. The company did not explain, however, how it decides which lookalike usernames get proactively reserved and which don't. The concerns have already reached regulators in India, where cyber fraud schemes frequently exploit messaging platforms to impersonate police, banks, and government officials. [...] Rachel Tobac, chief executive of SocialProof Security, called usernames a net privacy gain because they reduce the need to share phone numbers, which can expose users to SIM-swap attacks, phishing, and account takeovers. Still, she said, lookalike usernames still create opportunities for impersonation. "Ultimately, usernames are a great idea to avoid leaking your phone number to folks you don't know, but it's important to verify identity with the username function too," Tobac told TechCrunch. Her advice for most users: Pick a username that isn't easily guessable, so it's harder for attackers to find you, message you cold, or harass and spam you.

[...] The Mozilla Foundation said the introduction of usernames is likely to bring new tradeoffs. "Increased scams and impersonation from fake handles are potentially a big one," it told TechCrunch. "Checking a phone number can be a useful verification tool, but these harms are also permitted by the platform's fundamental design choices." Mozilla also flagged a broader interoperability question -- one worth logging if you're building on top of, or competing with, Meta's ecosystem. While letting users claim their existing Facebook and Instagram usernames may cut down on impersonation, it also shows how easily Meta can stitch identity together across its own apps, even as users still can't take that identity, or their contacts, to a rival platform. For now, WhatsApp says it is taking a gradual approach to the rollout. "We're taking our time and listening to feedback so that when it rolls out later this year we get it right," the company said in its FAQ.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Het Nederlands elftal is uitgeschakeld op het WK voetbal, maar Schiedam kan nog altijd juichen voor Kaapverdisch international Sidny Lopes Cabral. Hij overleefde met Kaapverdië de groepsfase. Zaterdag staat de wedstrijd tegen wereldkampioen Argentinië van Lionel Messi op het programma: "We moeten proberen hem te stoppen."

De onderhoudswerkzaamheden aan de Erasmusbrug zijn zo goed als voorbij. Stukken wegdek zijn vernieuwd en beschadigd asfalt is gerepareerd. De bekendste brug van Rotterdam gaat vrijdag om 16:00 uur weer open voor het verkeer. Dat betekent dat automobilisten niet meer om hoeven te rijden via de Willemsbrug of de Maastunnel.

Exclusive: Findings cast doubt on Starmer claims that reallocation of funds to MoD will boost British jobs

Keir Starmer’s decision to cut billions of pounds of infrastructure spending to pay for more defence equipment will end up costing the UK 10,000 jobs, according to an analysis of the government’s own figures.

The prime minister announced this week he was putting an extra £15bn into defence investment to revamp the country’s armed forces and boost British manufacturing.

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The president made $2.2bn last year, with plenty of help from his own political decisions. This is called corruption, folks

• People in the US: share your views on Trump’s earnings in his second term

In financial disclosures released on Tuesday, Trump reported earning more than $1bn last year from his several cryptocurrency ventures.

All told – including other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets – Trump made at least $2.2bn last year, as opposed to the roughly $622m his businesses raked in in 2024, before he returned to the presidency.

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It’s been dubbed ‘an American royal wedding’, so who will win the bridal commission of the century? We’ve whittled it down to nine lucky contenders (including one for the groom)

Ever since Taylor Swift announced her engagement to NFL star Travis Kelce via an Instagram post last August, fans have been gripped by a near year-long frenzy of sleuthing and speculation over the wedding plans.

This week the couple will finally be tying the knot. With guests reportedly signing NDAs and dates flying around Reddit, the facts are scant – but it’s been reported that the couple have rented out Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden, an arena which can hold more than 19,000 people, for celebrations on July 2 and 3.

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Having ordered a public inquiry, it is right that ministers are taking its ideas about managing risks seriously

It is two years this month since Axel Rudakubana burst into a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, murdered Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe, and injured 10 other people. The government’s pledge to implement all 67 recommendations from the public inquiry signals its determination to protect the public in future. Its chair, Sir Adrian Fulford, said his most important finding was the failure by any organisation to “take ownership of the risk” posed by Rudakubana. He revealed his interest in violence multiple times, including when he was found on a bus with a knife in 2022. Rather than make an arrest, police sent him home.

Sir Adrian and the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, want to ensure that in future, police confronted by a young man with a knife, and with a similar track record, would behave differently. A key part of the problem is what they, and other officials who encountered Rudakubana, did and didn’t know. The plan is to close the gaps between the public services that he repeatedly slipped through.

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Foreigners are not to blame for unemployment, crime and the state of public services. Leaders should have the courage to say so more clearly

Just over 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela expressed his sadness and anger at the rising hatred of foreigners in South Africa. “We had a legacy of unity and solidarity here,” the president told an African National Congress rally. “We are not victims to the influx of foreign people.”

Since then, xenophobic violence has periodically erupted. In 2008, anti-migrant attacks killed at least 62 people. Now a new wave is sweeping the country. Thousands marched in the streets on Tuesday – the arbitrary “deadline” that campaign groups had set for migrants to leave the country. More than 25,000 people did so in the run-up, with some countries evacuating their nationals and individuals fleeing in fear. Mozambique says five nationals were killed in anti-foreigner violence in May, and Ghana says a citizen was killed on Monday, though South African officials have offered different accounts. Migrants have been systematically blocked from health and other services by the Operation Dudula and March & March movements.

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Something for the digital crate-diggers: The 40 Best Albums From the Last 40 Years That You Probably Didn’t Hear (But Should’ve). I’d only heard of one or two these…

“Dictionary of the Illegible proposes illegibility as a strategy for navigating a world increasingly governed by visibility, efficiency, and total surveillance.”

Gedoe in Groningen. Dat heb je vaak, en wat je dan ook vaak hebt, is dat de hier ter redactie (en ter redactie van de zeloten van Pointer) bekende Driekus Vierkant zich er diametraal tegenaan bemoeit. Nu dit weer. "Komen er nieuwe kerncentrales in Groningen of in Zeeland? Dat is de grote vraag nu voor het kabinet twee locaties zijn overgebleven: De Eemshaven of Terneuzen. De Zeeuwen lijken er voorzichtig voor open te staan, maar de Groningers absoluut niet", meldt Met Het Oog Op Morgen, de blik van de Randstad. Maar is dat wel zo? Driekus dook in de enquêteresultaten en in de berichtgeving tot aan metadatalevel aan toe (kalm aan Sherlock, red.) en vond dat het met "absoluut" reuze meevalt. Sterker nog, het lijkt haast wel alsof de lokale politiek en media vooral heel erg graag willen dat er geen draagvlak is. Wat gek is, want er gaat niets boven kernenergie. En in het kader van de constructieve journalistiek komt hij ook nog met een plan! "Geef Groningers en hun bedrijven stroom tegen kostprijs plus, en geef de regio een aandeel met dividend op de export naar de rest van het land. Dan schiet die 51 procent draagvlak moeiteloos richting 75. De vraag is niet of Groningen het zich kan permitteren een kerncentrale toe te laten. De vraag is of het zich kan permitteren die kans te laten lopen, omdat het te druk was met klagen. Zet de draagvlakmachine uit. En begin met de hand die er het hardst aan draait: de eigen." BINDENDE LEESTIP derhalve.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide, April 1971

conspectus_bs posted a photo:

Kodak Ektar 100 with Mamiya RB67 and Sekor 90 mm

The Booker Prize will be renamed the Bukhman International Booker Prize and the prize money for the winning author and translator will be doubled.

They're not bad; they're just prompted that way. Sysdig threat hunters documented what they say is the first-ever documented agentic ransomware infection with an LLM - not a human - driving the entire extortion operation, from gaining initial access to compromising a production database server and destroying data. The security shop’s research team named the agentic intruder JadePuffer and said it gained initial access to an internet-facing Langflow instance by exploiting CVE-2025-3248, and then ran a fully automated attack. “The most striking characteristic, however, was the LLM's behavior,” Sysdig director of threat research Michael Clark said in a blog about the agentic ransomware and extortion operation. JadePuffer’s “self-narrating” payloads “contained natural language reasoning, target prioritization, and the kind of detailed annotations that human operators don’t often write but LLM-generated code produces reflexively,” Clark added. “The operation also adapted in real time, retrying failed steps within refined parameters. In one sequence, it went from a failed login to a working fix in 31 seconds.” After exploiting CVE-2025-3248, a missing authentication vulnerability in Langflow that allows remote, unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary Python on the host, the AI agent began scanning for and collecting secrets, including LLM provider API keys, cloud credentials “with explicit coverage of Chinese providers” including Alibaba, Aliyun, Tencent, and Huawei, while also scanning for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, cryptocurrency wallets, and database credentials. The AI also installed a crontab entry on the Langflow server to maintain persistence and call back to the attacker’s infrastructure every 30 minutes. JadePuffer’s intended target was a separate internet-exposed production server running a MySQL database and an Alibaba Nacos configuration service, we’re told. Nacos is an open-source service-discovery and dynamic configuration platform developed by Alibaba and used in the cloud provider’s microservices applications. The agent connected to the server's exposed MySQL port using root credentials, although Sysdig doesn’t know how the attacker obtained them. These credentials weren’t stolen from the victim’s environment. JadePuffer then attacked Nacos via multiple vectors including an authorization bypass flaw (CVE-2021-29441) and forging a valid JSON web token (JWT) using Nacos's default signing key. Additionally, using its root database access, the LLM injected a backdoor administrator into the Nacos backing database. It ultimately encrypted all 1,342 Nacos service configuration items using MySQL's built-in AES encryption function, and created an extortion demand, ransom note, Bitcoin payment address, and a Proton Mail contact: "YOUR DATA HAS BEEN ENCRYPTED. All NACOS configurations, REDACTED customer data, and REDACTED PII have been encrypted with AES-256.", "3J98t1WpEZ73CNmQviecrnyiWrnqRhWNLy", "e78393397[@]proton[.]me" However, according to the threat hunters, the victim can’t recover the encrypted data, even if they paid the ransom demand, because the agent escalated “from row-level deletion to dropping entire database schemas, narrating its own targeting rationale,” without backing up any of the encrypted data. There are a couple of things that security teams and vulnerability managers should do immediately to avoid being ransomed by this AI agent. First up: patch Langflow to a release that fixes CVE-2025-3248, and do not expose code-execution/validation endpoints to the internet. Also, don’t ever expose Nacos to the open internet, change its default token.secret.key, and upgrade to a release that forces a custom key. The threat hunters also recommend against running any AI orchestration servers with provider API keys or cloud credentials in their environment. While the AI agent didn’t use any especially sophisticated or unique techniques in this attack, the fact that an LLM “strung them together into a complete ransomware operation against neglected internet-facing infrastructure,” is notable, according to Clark. “The skill floor for running ransomware has dropped to whatever it costs to run an agent, and if that agent is running on stolen credentials through LLMjacking, the cost to an attacker is close to zero.”®